Third Reich Posters

FALLSCHIRMJÄGER & FLIEGER MARCHES

Description

Includes favorites like: Bomben auf Engelland

PzG nazi cd’s are outstanding for the attractive artwork featured on their covers, and “Fallschirmjaeger & Flieger Nazi Marches” is no exception. Like “Kriegsmarine Nazi Marches”, with its u-boat painting by Claus Bergen, his portrait of Stuka dive-bombers attacking through the clouds adorns this volume. It originally appeared in a 1939 issue of “Luftmacht Deutschland” (“Airpower Germany”) as an advertisement for Dessau’s Junkers Flugzeug und Motorenwerke AG, the factory responsible for manufacturing some of the finest aircraft of World War Two, and whose company song is featured in the album itself.

Listeners also have an opportunity to hear the real thing in action during the one minute-forty second sound-bite from a German nazi newsreel documenting the 1941 invasion of Crete. Among the most dramatic soundtracks ever recorded, Stukas scream during steep dives and bombs explode to the accompaniment of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” (a dramatic device borrowed forty years later by Francis Ford Coppola for his film, “Apocalypse Now”), while an excited narrator describes the combined parachute assault. The effect on German audiences of the time, witnessing all this on a big screen, must have been overwhelming. Paratroopers featured in the newsreel clip are represented by “Schoen bluehn’ die Heckenrosen” (“Beautiful bloom the hedgeroses”), “Marsch der Fallschirmjaeger” (“March of the Paratroopers”), and “Rot scheint die Sonne” (“Red shines the Sun”).

The Stuka even has its own song, the final selection in this collection which opened with “Bomben auf Engelland” by Norbert Schultze, composer of the Second World War’s most famous melody, “Lily Marlene”. The chorus sings, “We’re going to hunt the British lion in a final, decisive battle. We hold judgment on a world empire which will pass away. That will be our proudest day. Comrade, kiss the girls goodbye! The order now is, ‘Start your engines!’ Comrade, rush at the enemy! Bomb England!” Schultze passed away just two years ago.

Fallschirmjäger Marches is not confined, however, to music from “Hitler’s War”, to borrow the title from one of David Irving’s books. The “Bombenflieger Marsch” and “Revere Marsch” were favorites of the Condor Legion, which flew three years before in the Spanish Civil War. And the “Bruno Loerzer Marsch”, “Jadgeschwader Richtofen Marsh”, “Lied der Balloniere” (“Song of the Balloonists”), “Kampfgeschwader Immelmann”, and “Prinz Max Brigade” all harken back much earlier, to World War One. So too, the “Herrmann Goering March” celebrates the man who began building the Luftwaffe in 1935.

The “JU 88 Lied” (“Song of the Ju 88”) was sung by crews of one of the Second World War’s most versatile aircraft, a twin-engine medium bomber that helped tip the scales for victory in Norway, and went on to serve as a deadly torpedo-plane against Allied convoys, flew in the reconnaissance mode, and served as a night-fighter, even a radio-controlled bomb. The Ju 88 was so successful in all these roles it generated songs like “Flieger sind Sieger” (“Flyers are Victors”), music filled with pride and self-confidence after the Luftwaffe trounced one Allied air force after another.

All of the selections featured by “Fallschirmjaeger & Flieger Nazi Marches” have a sound different from their other Wehrmacht counterparts, although it is nonetheless firmly rooted in traditional German military music. Certainly, there has never been heard anything before or since quite like the powerful “Deutscher Flieger Marsch (“German Flyer March”) or “Flieger Fanfare”, both scored for what must have been exceptionally large brass bands. They play with a weight, precision and, most crucially, a spirit unique to the times in which these recordings were made. As such, they are invaluable sound documentation of a unique period in modern history.